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The psychological origins of procrastination – and how we can stop putting things off
Attach the work you have to do to your self-concept.
We generally want to keep a positive self-concept, so goals connected closely to our sense of self or identity take on much more value.
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Key Ideas
We usually procrastinate instead of being productive due to various reasons like having fun being distracted (like playing video games) or just lounging around as the task is too easy (or too diffi...
Recent studies on procrastination seems to suggest that the fear of failure could be a core reason for postponing tasks, as it is hard to:
We need to detect patterns in our behaviour and recognize the cause of any hidden or camouflaged fear.
There is a denial of procrastination, where we are telling ourselves that we are working as we should and there is no problem at all. The valid justifications we make to cover the problem or delay is essentially an excuse.
We make excuses as it is a valid cover to protect our self interest, and we often blame other people and circumstances to cover our own failure. If we could simply stop making excuses and start calling a spade a spade, we would learn a lot from our own behaviour.
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Key Ideas
A person’s belief and expectation that they are capable of completing a task.
When we don't trust the fact that we'll be able to complete a task (with good results), we're mor...
The more enjoyable a task, the less we procrastinate on it.
Boring tasks are more likely to lead to procrastination than difficult ones, that's why we keep postponing all the busywork (work that keeps us busy but has little value in itself.)
Difficulty maintaining focus in the face of immediate and more appealing distractions.
If we work in an environment where we're bombarded with distractions and we are not capable of resisting them, we're more likely to procrastinate.
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Key Ideas
Procrastination is fundamentally an emotional reaction to what you have to do. The more aversive a task is to you, the more you’ll resist it, and the more likely you are to procrastinate.
When you notice yourself procrastinating, use your procrastination as a trigger to examine a task’s characteristics and think about what you should change.
By breaking down exactly which attributes an aversive task has (boring, frustrating, difficult, meaningless, ambiguous, unstructured), you can take those qualities and turn them around to make the task more appealing to you.
... people have when they procrastinate: